If You Hate Standards, Learn To Love The Bell Curve

Despite the obvious flaws of an educational system based upon
academic standards, it is far superior to the available
alternatives.

The politically correct blood sport among educational commentators
these days is the jeremiad against the evils of academic standards and
testing. High expectations and, even worse, testing to ensure that
those expectations have been met is, in the accepted creed of the
faculty lounge and parent-teacher- organization meeting, the devil's
own instrument. As everyone knows, one must "teach to the test" and
thus engage in low-level "drill and kill" in order for students to
succeed on these mindless examinations.

What everyone knows is, of course, wrong. Winston Churchill said of
democracy that it is "the worst of all political systems—except
for all the others." So it is with standards. Despite the obvious flaws
of an educational system based upon academic standards, it is far
superior to the available alternatives.

Few analysts have considered the fundamental question: If standards
and testing disappeared tomorrow, what would be the alternative? To
hear the critics of standards and tests, the answer would be
educational paradise. Such an assumption rests upon the faith that,
absent standards and testing, every classroom would offer expectations
that were clear, rigorous, and objective. Success in one grade would be
related to success in the next grade, because communication and
coordination among teachers and different grade levels would be
flawless. Without external standards and expectations, the testing
conducted by teachers would be inherently fair because it would be
based upon the achievement of an objective result rather than
comparison of one student to the other.

If standards and
testing disappeared tomorrow, what would be the
alternative?

Paradise, alas, eludes us. The alternative to standards and testing is
not educational nirvana, but a return to the bell curve and its twin,
mystery grading. Without objective standards, the basis of comparison
for students is not the relationship of student work to an objective
standard, but the comparison of one student to the other. A few
students will succeed, a few will be tossed onto the academic scrap
heap, and the vast majority will be "normal" and thus fit the
distribution that characterized the eugenics movement and the
educational establishment for decades. The abandonment of standards
leads us to the era in which teachers identified bluebirds, robins, and
blackbirds, the choices of color hardly an accident. The abandonment of
testing embraces the world in which we have not perfection, but grading
as the mysterious determination of the teacher. What parent has not
endured the following conversation? "What did you do in school today?"
Nothin'. "Why did you get that grade?" I dunno. From the
mouths of babes shall come the truth. Only clear standards and
consistent assessments offer a coherent response to these entirely
reasonable questions.

The fundamental flaw in the reasoning of the critics of standards
and testing is this: However much they decry the evils of standards and
tests, the alternative is worse. The alternative to standards is the
bell curve, in which teachers have for decades compared student
performance not to an objective standard, but to that of other
students. This has provided the worst of both worlds: Proficient
students have been labeled as failures because they failed to achieve
scores higher than their more proficient colleagues'; nonproficient
students have been complacent because they were able to beat their less
proficient peers. If standards and state tests were eliminated
tomorrow, every school in the nation would be left with the absurdity
of students who cannot read, write, or compute at levels appropriate
for their grades feeling full of false self-esteem because they scored
"above average" when compared with their even less adequate peers.
Worse yet, students making great progress and at last performing at a
proficient level would be regarded as inadequate because their
proficiency was a percentile below another child's.

The argument against academic standards and rigorous tests rests
upon a syllogism that is honored more in the passion with which it is
expressed than the evidence supporting it. The syllogism asserts first
that academic standards are narrow in scope and inherently focused on
"mere facts" rather than deep thinking and analysis. Second, the only
way that one can succeed on standards- based tests is to engage in
mindless test preparation and the inherently evil "drill and kill"
exercises of the medieval classroom. Third, the good teacher who
insists upon rigorous analysis, reasoning, thinking, and writing would
produce students doomed to failure on standardized tests.

The alternative to standards and testing is not educational
nirvana, but a return to the bell curve and its twin, mystery
grading.

Reduced to its essence, this syllogism asserts that bad teaching yields
good test scores, and that good teaching yields bad test scores. Not
only does the evidence fail to support this common assertion, the data
on the subject lead to precisely the opposite conclusion. Research from
the Center for Performance Assessment, multiple other sources, and that
rarely considered factor, common sense, reveals that teachers who focus
on analysis, reasoning, thinking, and particularly writing not only
have challenging classrooms and literate students, but also produce
pupils with higher scores on state and district tests.

Neither of the prevailing political extremes, however, seems
interested in the evidence. Some protestors oppose standards and
testing, firm in the conviction that the bell curve is true and that
without social intervention, poor and minority children cannot succeed.
Such an inherently racist premise does scant justice to the good
intentions of those who advocate this position. Such a view also
ignores the mountain of evidence that demographics are not destiny.

The far right opposes standards and testing, convinced that somehow
the political aphrodisiac of "local control" will shrink if every
student is required to read, write, and compute. The appeal for local
control creates a curious alliance between the far right and militant
test protestors, both of whom apparently believe that their rights are
threatened if the public learns about the reading levels of
schoolchildren. When confronted with the fact that an astonishing
number of 8th grade students are unprepared for the literacy and
mathematical demands of high school courses, some advocates find it
easier to screech an oration on the benefits of local control or the
perils of tests than to teach students to read, write, and compute.
Neither side appears interested in, much less convinced by, evidence
that rigor, analysis, writing, editing, and hard work by students and
teachers yield better results than either mindless test prep or endless
whining about testing.

Some state academic standards are indeed narrow in scope, while
others focus on broad issues of analysis and understanding. But the
proposition that this is an irreconcilable paradox is laughable to the
workaday teacher, who understands that the concepts of mathematical
problem-solving will elude students who cannot add, subtract, multiply,
and divide.

Teachers toiling in the vineyard with real students also regard as
preposterous the notion that students can apply high-order thinking
skills to history, geography, and economics without understanding that
the Civil War preceded Vietnam, that the Balkans are not the Baltics,
and that there is rarely a singular cause for an historical or economic
effect. Regardless of the language of state standards and the contents
of state tests, good teachers routinely provide a combination of
factual knowledge and analytical understanding.

State tests have similarly inevitable failings. Tests fail to
reflect the full scope and complexity of the curriculum of schools. In
fact, no test can or should examine every element of every curriculum
in every school.

The demands of the legislators and those whom they represent, the
parents of today's schoolchildren, are much more modest than a
comprehensive evaluation of education.

No thoughtful
advocate of academic standards and rigorous state tests argues
that the present state of the art is perfect.

We simply want to know if our kids can read, write, and compute, and we
are not willing to concede that such a request constitutes child abuse,
despite the histrionic claims of the anti-standards movement.

No thoughtful advocate of academic standards and rigorous state
tests argues that the present state of the art is perfect. Standards
should be clearer and more rigorous. Tests should be more comprehensive
and clearly related to standards. I should be tall and handsome. The
remedy for two of these three deficiencies is perseverance, hard work,
and collaborative effort by people of goodwill. None of these
deficiencies will be remedied by the abandonment of standards or the
elimination of the measuring stick.

The clarion call for boycotting tests and abandoning standards
recalls the desire of the obese chain-smoker to hide the scales and
discard the blood-pressure cuff. When we don't like the results, blame
the instruments.

Most parents and many thoughtful but silent educators know that
hiding the results will not improve the health of the patient. We can
handle the truth, but we have a diminishing tolerance for those who
prefer fact- free self-congratulation to turning off the television and
video games, opening the backpack, and finishing our collective
homework.

Douglas B. Reeves is the president of the Center for Performance
Assessment, based in Denver, and the author of 10 books, including,
most recently, Crusade in the Classroom: How George W. Bush's Education
Reforms Will Affect Your Children, Our Schools (Simon & Schuster,
2001).

Douglas B. Reeves is the president of the Center for Performance
Assessment, based in Denver, and the author of 10 books, including,
most recently, Crusade in the Classroom: How George W. Bush's Education
Reforms Will Affect Your Children, Our Schools (Simon &
Schuster, 2001).

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